Lorraine Hansberry  (1930 - 1965)

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Lorraine Hansberry Collection  by James Earl Jones (Editor), Lorraine Hansberry, Ruby Dee (Editor)

Lorraine Hansberry by Richard M. Leeson

Born in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry earned critical acclaim as a dramatist before her death at age 34. Only a few years earlier, in 1959, her first-produced play, A Raisin in the Sun, received enthusiastic praise of Broadway critics and audiences alike. It was the first and longest running play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. When it won the New York Drama Circle Award for the best new drama that year, Hansberry became the first black woman and the youngest recipient ever to receive that honor. This reference book is a guide to her brief life and enormously influential career. The volume includes entries for all of her plays, with each entry providing plot synopses and production information. It also contains a wealth of bibliographical material, useful to students and scholars for conducting further research.

Lorraine Hansberry

From:  Voices from the Gaps:  Women Writers of Color

Excerpt:

Hansberry had begun to claim her identity as a lesbian in a 1957 letter to a lesbian periodical, The Ladder. This information and her 1964 divorce from Nemiroff was not widely known at the time of her death. In 1965 the Gay Liberation Movement did not exist and a woman could not claim such an identity without major reprisals. It was not until the 1980s that feminist scholars began connecting her feminist vision with her lesbian identity...

ISU Play Concordances: A Raisin in the Sun

This database contains the complete dialogue from the play A Raisin in the Sun in a full concordance format: every word in the dialogue of Hansberry's play is indexed and connected to its textual context. You can search it for wordlists (alphabetic and frequency-ordered), for KWIC concordances, and for collocations...

Lorraine Hansberry

Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 8- American Drama, PAL- Perspectives

Excerpt:

Deeply committed to the Black struggle for equality and human rights, Lorraine Hansberry brilliant career as a writer was cut short by her death when she was only 35. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award - Hansberry was the youngest and the first black writer to receive this award. Hansberry's purpose was to show "the many gradations in even one Negro family." The characters suffer, hope, dream, and triumph over the enormous barriers erected by the dominant culture...

Teacher's Guide:  A Raisin in the Sun

From Random House

Excerpt:

The 1959 Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun was a watershed in theatrical history. At a time when there was perceived to be no black Broadway audience, no commercial viability for a serious black play, and no significant "crossover" white audience for a play about African Americans, the underdog Raisin achieved the impossible: an all-out commercial and critical success. Indeed, its theretofore unknown 29-year-old playwright won the Best Play of the Year Award from the New York Drama Critics, the first black author and only the fifth woman to do so...

Names Index:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
| Authors Index | Scholars Index |